someone who's doing some things
I visited the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum at the beginning of December last year. I’d never been before, but I do love to visit museums of this kind. Whilst for the most part it was largely concerned with traditional instruments, it did have a little corner tucked away for electronic instruments, and that was nice. Not huge by any means, but nice.
Overall it was a fun place to visit, although, unlike some similar museums, I probably wouldn’t go again.
Like I say, I’m not a massive fan of the 7th Doctor. Not of the TV show or indeed the audiobooks. However, I do like the 4th Doctor story “Robots of Death”, and some (but certainly not all) the spin off stories from it. The most recent of these was Sons of Kaldor. That was an excellent story and I really enjoyed it, and actually, it was where I found out about this one.
The worst was a BBC story called “Corpse Marker“, which simply didn’t deliver at all and was a real disappointment. This story wasn’t bad at all. Not the best, not the worst by any means.
So it seems that PocketCHIP, and CHIP has gone. What a shame! I still have mine, and I’ll be holding on to it for a while now as it seems that there will be no more of this nice little device.
Their site is gone. Their twitter appears to be abandoned too. It’s a shame.
I’ve been a fan of the Mute Synth from Dirty Electronics since the very first one. I’ve got 3 now, Mute Synth 1, Mute Synth 2.0, and now the 4.0. It’s certainly the most complex of the Mute range, and, after a very brief play I think it has some very interesting possibilities.
I’m also interested to see how it can work with Mute Synth 2.0. Hopefully I’ll get to experiment with that in the not too distant future.
I backed this device on Kickstarter a long time ago, I mean a really long time ago. It was really late, and, to be honest, I’d wondered if it would ever arrive, but it did, and here it is.
But it’s here, and it works. It is actually better sounding than I expected it be. The keys are actually velocity sensitive and the touch screen is huge. I’m still getting to grips with it, and I think that’ll probably take me some time.
In some ways it reminds me of an updated Yamaha QY type device, which is, in my opinion quite a good thing. The other really interesting thing about the KDJ-One is that it has a whole bunch of apps that go with it. There’s a macOS app, an iOS app, and an Android app too. So far I haven’t found a way to get everything working together, but that’s on my personal roadmap.
A couple of weeks before Christmas I picked up the entire Carry On movies collection for just £5. That’s 30 movies on DVD. Not a bad deal I thought. I bought it at a bric-a-brac stall at a local Christmas Tree Festival, so I felt I’d done a little for the community and got a bargain into the bag.
I’ve always like a few of the Carry On movies, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them all. However, I decided that now was the time to watch the entire collection in order.
It’s been fun and difficult at the same time. The early movies are much more like Ealing comedies, and it took a while for signature Carry On style to emerge. Some of those early movies are my favourites, especially “Carry On Cabby”, which has to be my all time favourite. It wasn’t originally supposed to be called “Carry On Cabby”, in fact its original title was “Call me a cab”, which you can clearly hear in the title music. For me it is by far the best.
As you progress through the movies chronologically the style develops and, sadly, the quality drops off. I knew this when I started, but, for £5 it seemed like an interesting experiment.
But there are a few greats in my opinion. “Carry on up the Khyber” for instance. That is still one of my favourites. There are others too, but that one, along with Cabby really stand out for me.
The box set doesn’t include the reboot “Carry on Columbus”, which was pretty poor in my opinion. There was a plan to restart around 10 years ago, but this never came to anything, and I think that’s probably a blessing too.
It’s a great shame that Allihoopa has now gone dark. It was a great service. I made some good use of it, but not as much as I would’ve liked. I guess that’s a bit of a reminder for me. That is just the way it goes of course.
So I thought I’d grab all of my content from the site before it went down. I rendered all of my tracks to video, and then I added them to a 1 second video mash up. So here’s one minute and 20 seconds of tracks I uploaded to Allihoopa.
If you don’t remember Citizen Smith (and you’d need to be of a certain age to do so), then this post is probably not for you. Citizen Smith was a sitcom back in the late 1970’s. It ran for about 3 years and was probably quite good for its time.
A couple of years ago I posted about its return, but it seems that hasn’t happened. I can’t even remember where I heard about it.
The other night I got the DVD out of seasons 1 and 2 and started to watch them. I’d started this before, when I bought the DVDs, but hadn’t got very far. Once again I didn’t get very far. Why? Mainly because it was really awful.
When I say awful, I don’t mean awful by 1970’s standards, I mean by today’s standards, which is of course totally unfair. Judging this show by today’s criteria makes no sense at all. It wasn’t written or performed by those standards and it shouldn’t be watched by those either. That’s hard though. When I watch this I simply can’t help but see it in terms of what is in my opinion good for now.
In reality it was a great show for its day. I can remember enjoying it back then, and the fact that I can’t really enjoy it now shouldn’t damage that memory.
I’d still like to see a reboot of it though. I think that could be fun.
For now, I don’t think I’ll be putting those DVDs back in the player.
What a great idea that would have been!
I did some searching for “Carry On” X films, and this was one of the best things I found, if not the best.
I did find a few other photoshopped things, which were funny but not on this scale.
Disney’s film “The Black Hole” was their response to “Star Wars”. I can remember going to the cinema to see it, and the memory of it has always stayed with me. So much so that I found a copy of the film on eBay a few years ago and watched it again.
More recently I thought I’d get hold of a copy of the book, or rather, the novelisation of the film and try that. I finished reading it just the other day, and, on the whole, it is a fairly true reflection of the film itself. However, just as in the film, the ending, leaves quite a lot to be desired.
But the most confusing thing was the ending. The end sequence of the film seems to suggest that there is somewhere inside the black hole, and that’s where Dr Reinhardt and his evil robot Maximilian appear to be merged. It pretty much looks like hell though. The ending also seems to suggest that the crew of the Palomino make it through the black hole (can you go through a black hole?) and come out the other side.
One of the things that was a bit odd about the story were several references to how much things cost. This was in the film and the book. On a series of occasions characters referred to how much the Cygnus (the huge spaceship in the picture above) cost the tax payer. I felt that this was a bit strange and kind of out of place.
Although the book suggests that they have some kind of merged consciousness by the time they come through it.
All parts of this ending are pretty much unsatisfactory though. Even as a kid I wasn’t happy with this, and I’m still not happy with it. I felt like it required something more in terms of an outcome that could be comprehended. Of course, there will never be a remake now, or at least that’s very unlikely I would think. Depending on which source you check the remake was being considered in 2006 or 2009, but by 2016 was ruled out.
It’s a shame, it’s a missed opportunity I think, but never mind. The music was awesome.
I am Ashley Elsdon 